Prelude to Blade Runner Part I: Bubblegum Crisis

Blade Runner is a film whose echo can still be felt today. Bubblegum Crisis, Metal Gear Solid, Minority Report, AI, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Dark City, Natural City, Sky Blue, even Star Wars – they all take visual cues from the movie in some way, or in the case of Natural City, an entire plot and philosophy! I figure I’ll explore the movies and shows and video-games that were affected by Blade Runner before talking about Blade Runner, so that it is made known the magnitude of the film we’re dealing with…

One day, some guy in Japan saw Blade Runner and misinterpreted a lot of it. He got the visuals though, and some of the names of things. It was probably a fan sub. Anyway, he got to work, and Bubblegum Crisis was born.

There are many different spin-off series of the 8-episode OVA that I saw (through YouTube.com, no less) and I don’t know if it’s based on a manga or not. As kind of an okay-to-averange anime fan, I’m not really the best resource for these things anyway. While the original series is heavily informed by the look, the subject, and the style of Blade Runner, apparently later iterations like The AD Police mix Ghost in the Shell and Robocop in.

Add on top of that callouts to Battlestar Galactica and it’s almost unbelievable that modern Internet dorks didn’t made this, but real professionals. It’s so dangerously close to fan fiction – how could it carry such a name for itself? There’s a few reasons for that.

For starters, it’s pretty good. For a show about robot suits and robots, it’s decently entertaining, though I don’t know how much of that I have to owe to Fast Karate for the Gentleman bumping up the entertainment value by commenting on every single helicopter incident (all the helicopter pilots in the show, every episode, say “I’m going in for a closer look,” which heralds their deaths by robot laser). It’s also got a very naive mentality to it, something uncommon considering its subgenre. It exists in a world where the super-powered robot apocalypse is flanked by 80’s workout music and heroes who have a front as lengerie store owners.

80’s is probably the key word there. Just like the great films of our time, Commando, Total Recall, Die Hard, Robocop, Predator – Bubblegum Crisis has that action movie feel because it combines good-to-gooder fight scenes with shenanigans of all varieties, totally forgoing anything that makes other better known cyberpunk anime good – intelligence, seriousness (that’s subjective of course). There are so many ridiculous things that happen in this show, it’s hard to believe that somewhere among the inspirations was a story by Philip K. Dick, arguably the hardcorest science-fiction author.

Bubblgeum Crisis, so named for the idea that the city (MegaTokyo) is on edge like a bubblegum bubble about to pop, transplants the Blade Runner look and some of the ideas into a Streets of Fire/Metropolis world where robots, created by the evil, evil, evil Genom Corporation, run rampant frequently, and it’s up to the vigilante, all-female, robot-suit clad squad known as the Knight Sabers to fight them!

What? I swear – Blade Runner the anime doesn’t do this show justice. For example, exploring any part of the show to any degree of depth as you would Blade Runner reveals some inconsistencies; how exactly do the Knight Sabers afford the most expensive most powerful armor suits on the planet?

And how are they vigilantes, you might ask, if they only fight robots, like Rick Deckard? Well in each episode someone who was ‘friends’ with our main character Priss (as opposed to Pris) gets killed in some way by Genom, and it’s up to the Knight Sabers to fight them! It seems to be revenge every episode, so I suppose that vengeance fueled their creation? Damn bad luck if they’re still in operation… Stop making friends, or confusing the word ‘friend,’ with ‘barely-an-acquaintence…’

The reason I say that the Japanese guy behind this (yeah I’m sure it was just one guy) misinterpreted Blade Runner is because the parallel is imperfect. Yes the cityscape is very derivative in Bubblegum Crisis, but I don’t see the connection with Genom to Tyrell, for example. Tyrell is amoral, not immoral. Genom wants to destroy the world with robots, and that’s why heroes have to fight them. Why the company is popular I don’t know. Tyrell the man didn’t anticipate Roy Batty and the Replicants, and is only out to make a whole lot of money.

But that’s whatever. Bubblegum Crisis doesn’t align with Blade Runner entirely because there’s no good reason it should (see: Natural City). It was just a good idea – add rocknroll, transforming motorcycles and the clichest villains ever and you have Bubblegum Crisis – check it.